On 5 September the High Court began hearing the first of two judicial review applications which aim to stop the government proceeding with its plans to send thousands of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda. The second case will take place in October and the judgments for both will then be issued together. These legal challenges follow the Home Office’s failed attempt to begin this process on 14 June, when a sustained political and legal campaign prevented the flight planned for that day from taking off. NICKI JAMESON reports.
The court was told that Rwanda had not been the British government’s preferred destination and that in February 2021 was not on a list of seven potential partners for a ‘migration deal’. In March that year Foreign Office civil servants had told then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab that if Rwanda were chosen, ‘we would need to be prepared to constrain UK positions on Rwanda’s human rights record, and to absorb resulting criticism from [the] UK parliament and NGOs’. A year later this had all been pushed aside and the Rwandan state has already received advance payment of £140m from Britain for initial costs of the scheme.
Government plans new flight
After the 14 June flight was prevented from taking off, the government said that no further attempts to effect mass deportations to Rwanda would be made until after both the Conservative leadership election and the two judicial reviews were complete. However in late August the Home Office began sending asylum seekers letters of intent to remove them to Rwanda and giving them 14 days in which to appeal. According to charities working with newly arrived migrants, some 19 people have been served with such notices, including at least six who have been trafficked or tortured.
The government says that, as the scheme has not been ruled unlawful, it is entitled to continue with it, and continues to maintain that it is a ‘key part of our strategy to overhaul the broken asylum system and break the business model of evil people-smuggling gangs’ (The Guardian 25 August). New Prime Minister Liz Truss made it clear in her leadership campaign that she would press ahead with the Rwanda plan, as did also-ran Rishi Sunak.
Despite the government’s enthusiasm, both the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the British parliament’s own Home Affairs Committee have said that in practice the threat of removal to Rwanda has no deterrent effect on people seeking asylum in Britain. On 13 September the Ministry of Defence said that 28,592 people had crossed the channel in small boats this year so far, more than the total for the whole of 2021 (28,526), itself the highest figure at that point.
Having put all its eggs in the Rwanda basket, the government is now scrabbling around for other headline grabbing deterrent ideas. In Priti Patel’s final weeks as Home Secretary she announced plans to restart work on ‘channel pushbacks’, an idea even more controversial than the Rwanda flights and one around which there is no real dispute as to its illegality in international maritime law. She also met with her Albanian counterpart to discuss a deal to expedite the deportation of Albanians who come to Britain via the Channel. This could potentially involve Albanian police being stationed in southern England to assist with identification and removal.
Attacking human rights
On the same day that the first judicial review hearing began, Liz Truss succeeded Boris Johnson as prime minister. Having rearranged the Cabinet, virulent Home Secretary Priti Patel has been removed from office. Patel was not only the champion of the Rwanda plan and channel pushbacks, but also presided over the introduction of both the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the racist Nationality and Borders Act.
It’s a hard act to follow, but Patel’s replacement is the even more vitriolic Suella Braverman, who has been described as ‘Priti on steroids’. Braverman, whose parents emigrated to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius, describes herself as a ‘child of the British Empire’ and the Empire as ‘a force for good’.
Speaking in August, Braverman said that it should be a ‘national priority’ to extricate Britain from the malign influence of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). She complained that the ECHR permits foreign nationals convicted of crimes to avoid deportation on family and health grounds, and protesters charged with criminal offences to cite their rights to freedom of expression and assembly in their defence. Unfortunately for Braverman, she won’t get to preside over this extrication just yet as one of Truss’ first acts as PM was, at least for now, to shelve the Bill of Rights Bill. This Bill was designed to revoke the Human Rights Act 1998, which enshrine the ECHR in British domestic law. Introduced in Parliament on 22 June by Braverman’s predecessor Dominic Raab, it was so badly drafted as to be incomprehensible even to most of its supporters.
Although the Bill of Rights Bill is off the parliamentary agenda for now, the Conservative Party remains wedded to the populist mantra that ‘human rights have gone too far’ and will undoubtedly be bringing it back in a redrafted form in the not too distant future. Whenever this is and whatever the outcome of the legal challenges to the Rwanda deportation plan, anti-racists and anti-imperialist in Britain will need to keep up solidarity action on the streets to defend migrants and oppose all Britain’s racist immigration laws.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 290 October/November 2022
